John Kelly's Irish Landscapes at O'Sullivan Antiques

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While over one million people starved to death in Ireland from 1845 – 1850, boatloads of grain regularly arrived from Ireland, through the port of Liverpool, to feed the citizens of England. The Irish people had been colonized by the English and most Irish worked for various wealthy (mostly English) landlords who never even considered stopping the transport of food from Ireland to England so that the Irish themselves might be saved while the potato crop was decimated by a fungus. The tenant farmers who were dependent on the potato starved while the wealthy landowners reaped tremendous profits from the Irish grain they exported. This was free market capitalism at its most transparently inhumane, but it has come down to us through history whitewashed as the potato ‘famine’. Yet, a famine is when there is no food – there was an overabundance of food…the Irish just weren’t allowed to eat it.   

  

John Kelly was born in England to Irish and English parents who raised him in Australia. He now lives in Cork where the Great Hunger was especially horrific. Discovery of a letter written to the Times of London by a witness of the Great Hunger in his region lead Kelly to realize that no visual record of this tragedy existed in the art of the time. Actually, this shouldn’t have been all that surprising, since, until the French Revolution, the only suffering in Western visual art was the suffering of Jesus, some martyrs, souls in hell and maybe some mythological figures being punished for arrogance.  Suffering depicted in art due to social or economic or military oppression is non-existent until after the French Revolution and, even after the French Revolution, when artists could choose their topics for the marketplace, independent of patrons, they often chose what would sell. Real, gut-wrenching suffering that motivates social action doesn’t sell to art buyers.

Furthermore, the suffering depicted pre-French Revolution was meant to awe and inspire and fill the viewer with admiration and veneration, not a sense of outrage. This type of suffering is even, at times, very sensual - to the point where Renaissance and Baroque suffering does not only not encourage us to connect and empathize with victims, but, in fact, it encourages us to become sexually aroused by them (the Japanese writer Mishima had his first orgasm while looking at Guido Reni’s St. Sebastian). You need to stylize and sexualize suffering in the visual arts to make a buck from it.

{{{Kelly enjoys referencing the papier-mache cows made by William Dobell in WWII, which were placed near Australian airfields to confuse Japanese pilots into thinking the airfields were really farms. This piece represents a cow stuck up a tree after a flood.}}}

Kelly’s response to all of this seems to be non-linear but relevant and meaningful. He turns to landscape painting and the true horror to be derived from his paintings is that no trace of the horror can be readily found. The High and Low Islands which bore witness to the suffering on shore look tranquil and inviting. This peace, beauty and sublimity demands, however, a strong response. The Marquis de Sade once said, “Every death, even the cruelest death, drowns in nature’s indifference.” 

In response to this indifference (which parallels the indifference of the English upper classes who nearly committed genocide against the Irish), we are required to speak out and remember the atrocities that both nature and our system of social classes tend to swallow up or wipe away. So through these landscapes Kelly is not looking to validate a historical record or collect and present evidence. Yet, there is a palpable reverence and sadness and evidence of a personal act of compassion and deep sympathy for the loss of life that has never been fully acknowledged by the English government or our history texts. In the painting ‘Sticks (Moonlight)’ (pictured above) Kelly references this sense of reverence by painting what is left of artist Susan O’Toole’s site-specific sculpture ‘Tree Sentinel’ – originally 18 long tree trunks or ‘sticks’ fixed into the ground in Cork to commemorate the Great Hunger in the early 2000s.

Indeed, if we look at the paintings themselves, this seems to be landscape painting divested of any sense of romanticism or transcendence. It could be argued that landscape painting is, in itself, very ‘pagan’, hearkening back to a desire for union with Arcadia, very pre-Christian in its orientation, shooting for something non-Christian, non-allegorical and something that winds up on the canvas which has not been mediated through the intellect.   I would call Kelly’s work a type of ‘secular’ landscape – the painting technique seems affected by the knowledge of what happened on the land. You don’t have the soft blurriness characterizing the English Romantic painters – each aspect of the landscape is clearly delineated from other aspects…sea, sky, land…we see the landscape but might struggle to be affected by it in the way that we have been affected by landscape in the past.

This is landscape that swallows up human suffering instead of landscape of a harmonious, balanced and timeless mood. Yet, we can also feel that this is sacred landscape and the silence does not have to be the forced silence imposed through the censoring of history text books and the oppression of thought by dominant economic classes…it can be a silence of deep and moving reverence and horror for those who were abandoned by the world to inhumane and tortuous deaths so that some could live in economic comfort at the expense of others.

The show was curated by Seol Park of Spark Associates Art Management and it is currently being held at O’Sullivan Antiques at 51 E. 10^th Street, New York, NY until October 15^th, 2015.  

'hysterics' - Videos by Jeamin Cha at Doosan Gallery New York City

“Pain makes people raise questions, and those who raise questions become hysteric.” Jeamin Cha

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Doosan Gallery is, like many Chelsea galleries, pretty liberal with its free wine on Thursday openings, but on April 16, 2015 there was no wine and the mood was somber. It was the first anniversary of the Sewol tragedy – when a ship overturned off the coast of Korea killing over 300 people, mostly Korean school children. Indeed, on that day of the opening thousands of Koreans took to the streets in Seoul in protest over their perception that justice was not done in regard to the reckless killing of these children. The crew, many of whom acted cowardly, were punished harshly, but the perception to many seems to be that many of the folks who profited from the dangerous illegal construction that put lives in danger to make a few extra bucks, and who, through their callous greed, truly caused the ship to capsize, are or will all be free and clear within a short time.

The mood was appropriate for Jeamin Cha’s current show at Doosan – hysterics – comprised of installation pieces and videos. The show covers, in part, the theme of how injustice can eat away at those who are victimized by it due to their acceptance of the pervading belief in every civilized society that justice and fairness are basic human rights. To discover that, despite the rhetoric, justice can and often is easily or casually subverted leads to intense inner crisis for those involved as victims. The centerpiece of the show, for me, is the 9 minute video titled “Autodidact” about Hur Young-chun. In 1984 he learned that his son had died in the South Korean military and he was told that his son had committed suicide. Yet, the details he learned of the story just didn’t add up. This occurred during the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, who, among other things, seemed responsible for the May 18, 1980 slaughter of students and citizens in Gwangju and who attempted to kill Kim Dae-jung, who would become a future democratically elected Korean president and Nobel Peace Prize winner (in an act of true mercy and forgiveness, Kim would later pardon Chun).

Unable to accept what he felt might be a lie told to him by the Chun Doo-hwan government, Hur taught himself forensic medicine to investigate all of the evidence himself in order to determine exactly what probably had happened to his child. His conclusions, based on the principles of forensic science, are that his son was murdered. Yet, knowing and demonstrating the truth does not necessarily lead to justice. The ruling of suicide was overturned under a more liberal government, but then reversed back to suicide later. Toward the end of this year there will be, apparently, another hearing concerning this matter.  Mr. Hur has thus been pursuing this matter now for over 30 years in what might be considered to be a modern day pursuit of redress tantamount, due to the extreme measures pursued, to that of Michael Kohlhaas in the Kleist short-story, but done within the system, with a father desperately hoping that justice will suddenly appear where it has simply not seemed to appear before. The video shows a father who is driven by his belief in justice in the midst of corruption, his contempt for injustice and his commitment to the memory of his dear son.

Every one of the short videos in the gallery is well worth seeing and I am truly sorry I was not able to get this review up sooner. The show apparently will close on Thursday. If you can get there, give yourself an hour or so to move from video to video and read through the wonderful booklet that Doosan has prepared.   

hysterics – Jeamin Cha

Doosan Gallery New York

535 W. 25^th Street

Christine Mackey at AC Institute

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The county you live in, in NY State, can mean a great deal to folks from other counties of the state and provide a way by which you might be judged. For instance, there are 62 counties in NY State. If we look at the overall health of folks in the various counties, the Bronx comes in at 62^nd even though one-half of Bronx residents receive free medical care in the form of Medicaid. Rockland County is the ‘healthiest’ county. Rockland has a median family income of $96,000 (4^th highest behind Westchester, Nassau and Putnam) as opposed to the Bronx’s $38,000. The next lowest county in regard to median family income is Lewis with $49,000.

Christine Mackey takes pieces of scotch tape and traces sections of the borders of New York State counties onto these pieces from a map. She then affixes the tape randomly to the walls of a room in AC Institute so that she gets a type of wild rhizome or dendritic pattern. In fact, when I walked into the room for this installation, initially I thought I was surrounded by numerous cracks throughout the walls.

As is the case with a map of NY State, the borders of a traditional map often indicate divisions between cultural or socio-economic groups.  Think about the cultural division between Bronx and Rockland Counties. The borders on a traditional map act as a validation and reinforcement for insidious social and economic processes that have divided people racially, ethnically and economically. Mackey’s rhizome patterns present a vision of these borders fragmenting, inviting a greater mixture and accessibility than before. They highlight how divisions between people within a state can become reified through the map-making process. Once you draw these lines you know where to go and where not to go, you can start collecting numbers and categorizing folks into ‘us’ and ‘them’. In Mackey’s process the map borders used to mean – “You are not wanted here” or “I will not go there”, but now all restrictive connotations are lost. 

The borders change from barriers to become root-like or dendritic - no longer guided by social or economic patterns but moving in strange contours, kind of like a malfunctioning missile leaving a smoke trail of wild twists and turns. Rhizomes always proceed from some type of node, but we do not see any nodes in the rhizome patterns on the walls of AC Institute – so these are no longer anchored borders, they are no longer connected to race, ethnicity, income: they have become fragile and flimsy or like cracks in a wall or smoke trails in the air. Symbolically then, the map represents something cognitively fixed and predictable and something from which we derive a limited amount of self-satisfying and reinforcing knowledge. To fragment the borders of a map and present the borders as rhizomes, roots or dendrites is to invite a new process of discovery and engagement in which processes that divide us are abandoned and we explore our shared humanity with concern and compassion.

Reconfigured - Margaret Thatcher Projects

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Meg Hitchcock

My maternal grandmother (a truly saintly person) had immigrated to the USA from the old country and was a quietly devout Catholic. When I was a kid and used to stay overnight, I always slept in a room that had a portrait of the face of Jesus, with his crown of thorns, as he was dying on the cross (so at her place I was never afraid of a vampire climbing through my window).  I could see, however, that the entire portrait was comprised of very small words, some darker and some lighter.  So it turned out that there was a guy from the old country in the neighborhood who took the entire text of the Gospel According to John and reconfigured the form of the text and lightened and darkened the words to create different scenes from the “Passion” (death process) of Jesus – all incredibly mawkish and gruesome. That the guy would do something so labor intensive as this gave, to the elderly ethnic Catholic ladies around me, the sense that this was especially holy stuff to hang in their spare bedrooms. It wasn’t just a drawing of a dying Jesus, it was a drawing of words meticulously and perfectly arranged.

Meg Hitchcock (along with the entire staff of Margaret Thatcher Projects) is probably going to hunt me down and beat me up for even remotely mentioning her work in the same breath as a kitschy dying Jesus made of words, but I think we have a rarified and distilled and more thought-provoking version of this concept of reformatting words in the current show at Thatcher.  While I was packed in the gallery during the opening, looking at a vertically arranged, almond or boat shaped figure (a vesica piscis?) on the wall, it hit me that the figure was comprised of teeny tiny little letters. As I focused on the letters, slowly but surely I began to make out the fact that the letters comprised the beautiful Christian spiritual “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”.   

So Hitchcock takes pieces of sacred or religious texts from one holy book/source and cuts out individual letters to recreate pieces of text from another holy book/source, but in more meaningful shapes. So I’m guessing there are two parts involved in grasping why she does this. First, perhaps, from her perspective, she realizes that when we read a sacred text we are often only moved or changed by specific quotes, lines, anecdotes or metaphors. The whole text is given meaning by these little meaningful snippets within larger fluffier material.

But what gives power to these little meaningful snippets? Each word in conjunction with others which suddenly evokes something in us as we engage in the linear reading process.  And what gives power to each word? Each letter…so she seems to treat each letter of the English alphabet the way the ancient Nordic folks treated their sacred Runic alphabet – each letter possessed power and meaning and when combined with other Runes presented something more than words: a capacity for engagement that could lead to spiritual transformation (Odin sacrificed an eye and hanged for 9 days from a tree to get the Runes). Hitchcock makes you focus on what exactly gives language the capacity to engage – where is this power ultimately stored: in the letters? words? combinations of words? How is such meaningful communication possible? What separates the text of the Bhagavad Gita from the New York Post? The same letters and sentence structures are used in both. So then part two is when the viewer him/herself pieces together and is impacted by the meaning of these ‘runes’. For instance, I especially liked going through the effort to read, in one piece, the little phrase “…Him who possesses the power in ecstasy…” For Hitchcock these sacred snippets require new forms that require extra effort from the viewer.

Belcher

Belcher

Jaq Belcher starts with just a simple sheet of white paper and from the medium of the paper itself thinks of the possibilities of conveying something meaningful. Instead of adding to the paper, she finds ways to take something from the paper to express various concepts or evoke a certain awareness or sense of something normally ineffable. If I am not wrong, she seems to often slice out what is called the vesica piscis (also mentioned above). You get this shape from two circles with the same radius intersecting so that the center of each circle touches the perimeter of each circle. 

This is a very ancient symbol that goes as far back as Egypt, and maybe farther. Some folks say this is a stylized vagina – the vagina representing the fulfilment of spiritual desire symbolically represented by the penis. She carves out these vesica piscis shapes through a repetitive process which demonstrates a sense of supreme equanimity. She is capable of performing the same action producing the same effect over and over again, like continually shooting an arrow into a target’s bulls-eye.  If she is cutting vesica piscis shapes, we get designs based on these scared symbols of fulfillment where the shapes alternate with empty space, the empty space, paradoxically, perhaps, more directly representing the concept of calm and peace than the symbols.

Fowler

Fowler

Adam Fowler creates layers of swirling lines, in two steps, using materials he knows the viewer will be familiar with – a graphite pencil and sheets of paper. First Fowler creates his drawings and then using an exacto knife, he slices and layers what he has drawn. The swirling lines, for me, represent cognition or inner processes that are occurring or have occurred but which cannot, perhaps, be stored into memory and later expressed. 

The swirls or curly cues are a type of nervous energy, perhaps, that comes from inner engagement and the attempt to understand ourselves. We are thinking, struggling, aspiring, searching for ways to overcome obstacles and this work really seems to me to show the inexpressible internal effort we put forth in our attempt to become more humane. The swirls reminded me of P-300 waves. P-300 waves are waves that the brain produces when we have meaningful insights, or solve difficult problems - these swirls don’t look like P-300 waves but they are like P-300 waves to me.  I think Fowler’s work, to me at least, is what inner development looks like from the outside. If you have to represent the deep dive inward and what happens next, you get these layers of swirling, curving lines.

Swid

From what I have been able to tell, Nan Swid takes antique books and old ledger books, covers them with encaustic or paint, and places these materials within a square or rectangular pattern. By covering the books with encaustic she is, of course, rendering them useless.  The implication for me is that the encaustic covering represents a realization or insight that the type of engagement to be derived from text may be insufficient compared to another self-generated and more organic and creative inner process. She seems to be pointing at the limitation of textual engagement and pointing toward something more necessary.  It’s as if the books have been read, the accounts have been tabulated and now they are permanently sealed.  The person cannot and does not want to go back to the text, which has pushed the person away from text into a deeper form of engagement.

   

The Ambiguity of the Erect Penis: Nicolas Gaugnini at Bortolami

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All images courtesy of Bortolami Gallery

The erect human penis, in the history of art, religion and culture, once used to be of paramount significance. One of the earliest discovered painted representations of a human figure was, in fact, in a Lascaux cave, dating back thousands of years, where a human figure with the head of a bird stands with an erect penis while apparently being killed by a bison with its entrails spilling out. As James Frazer explained in his amazing work The Golden Bough, in ancient agricultural societies the erect penis was a fertility symbol and representations of the penis had magical functions to help ensure the fertility of the land. In ancient Greece and Rome erect penises abounded.  

In Nicolás Guagnini’s wonderfully penis laden show at Bortolami, though, we have to ask the question: What is the erect penis now as a raw symbol in a secular age devoid of both shamans and a belief in fertility magic? Actually, Guagnini puts the penis within the perspective of contemporary economics as he, among other things, asserts that Freud’s little boys who feared castration have evolved into the ‘spectacular patriarchy of late capitalism.’ In fact, Yanzhen, a friend of mine who is getting her PhD in business, had an interesting take on Guagnini’s use of the erect penis.  Her take was that the penis aids in the construction of male selfhood and arouses thoughts and desires for private property. Private property and the allocation of wealth is also passed on along one’s bloodline creating inequality. Allocation after production is based on maximizing the interests of one's own interest group, which is usually one's bloodline. This becomes the foundation of an economy, social structure and political system.

In allegorical literature or art the sexual union of male and female always seemed to represent the union of desire and spiritual fulfillment. So I am assuming an erect penis can more closely represent this concept of desire. An erection for a guy is both pleasant and painful – the element of pain goads the guy forward to seek a sexual partner.  Sexual gratification is one measure of the seeking of pleasure and another measure of the elimination of a painful goading. The desire for sexual gratification, in fact, seems to perfectly mirror, metaphorically, the desire for spiritual communion. The person who seeks perfection is goaded forward by the pain of imperfection. Guagnini seems interested in, however, how “Capital is desire. This condition has reduced our form of life into biopolitical submission.”  In late capitalism basic needs are not met in wide swaths of the world, wealth is not created for the benefit of an entire society and desire is produced in the consumer as a way of creating extraneous, wasteful need which triggers increases in income gaps.

So what about these giant heads with penises coming out of the eye sockets? So these figures’ eyes have been literally replaced by penises. Does this mean the figures have abandoned themselves to a pursuit of pure late capitalist desire?  Has the penis evolved from fertility object to an object representing commodity fetishism and hoarding? These figures have literally become their desire? Or have these figures dived deep into themselves to further investigate and question the desire that goads them forward? Instead of pupils to capture and process light, we see the urethral openings of the penises ready to ejaculate.  

These heads are not the only feature of this show, however.  Accompanying the show is a large free publication, designed by Bill Hayden, titled: Some Notes on Dickface by Nic (the quotes above were taken from this publication). Dickface is a new type of font (which you can see at dickface.me) in which the letters are made from images of penises.  While reading through the publication sometimes you can just focus on the text to get the meaning of what Guagnini is writing, while at other times you realize suddenly you are reading a text comprised of penises. You periodically shift from deriving meaning to seeing penises. Perhaps this means that the artist, himself, is engaging in a capitalist endeavor. He is, basically, selling these radical ideas. To a great extent art has become the commodification of radical ideas concerning individual and societal development.

The text deals with ethical  issues concerning capturing carnage and human suffering on film, the effects on a viewer of witnessing the horrors of mass death through photography, fetishism – in anthropological and sexual terms (as well as Freud’s belief that all men fear castration),  hoarding as a psychological manifestation of late capitalist waste, amputation of noses as an ancient punishment, Christian iconoclasts, the death of classical antiquity, identity formation, auditory hallucinations and Bosch’s use of two ears and a knife, in his Garden of Earthly Delights, as hidden phallic symbolism (among other topics). The publication is free and in a limited edition of 1,000. Images of various types of carnage are often comingled with fashion photography into which some of the artist’s ceramic sculptures have been superimposed.

Reading the publication may help elucidate the meaning of the 12 ceramic figures which are amalgams of feet, hands, ears, noses and penises.  One of the first images seen in Guagnini’s publication is an image of many severed feet and legs piled on top of each other (perhaps from an American Civil War field hospital where amputations occurred). As mentioned above, he also deals with themes of castration, severing of noses and ears etc. Many of these amalgams of body parts are set on top of closed art or art theory books.  

Feet represent movement, hands represent action, the nose and ears perception and the penis desire. So what does it mean to combine these body parts together and place them on art books? To me, when I first saw the show, these severed and recombined body parts represented kind of organic Duchamp-like ‘assisted readymades.’  Guagnini could be saying that these combinations of the features of these body parts are the common denominators of everything written in the books or that these severed and recombined parts are a common hindrance to really grasping what might be offered in the books. There’s definitely an interesting contrast between the amalgams of ceramic body parts and the books they rest on and you can get your own intuitive feeling as for what’s going on by dropping by and experiencing the show.

As a postscript - I am now wondering whether the severed hands, feet, noses, ears and penises are meant as a type of anti-art statement. Maybe the artist is saying that when we approach art, we can only approach it from a purely visual perspective. Overall experience is multi-sensory and requires movement and action and various senses. Art engages us on a limited basis, whereas transformative experience engages us multidimensionally. 

My Top 10 Art Gallery Solo Shows of 2014

This past year, starting in February, I began collaborating with Arte Fuse and posting most of my reviews there (and also cross-posting here to continue serving the readers who got used to this blog). This top-ten list is, however, exclusive to this blog.  You can see all my Arte Fuse reviews here: http://artefuse.com/author/daniel-gauss/ 

I reviewed over 75 shows this past year, and it was hard to narrow them down, but I chose these ten for purely subjective reasons.  I loved every show I reviewed, or I would not have reviewed it.

The Proletarian Art Snob's 10 Favorite Shows of 2014! 

Without further ado, we start with number 1.

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1. Paul Glabicki at Kim Foster Gallery

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-limits-of-measurement-are-shown-in.html

Glabicki first gained notoriety in the experimental film scene. He created work of ingenious complexity and humor. He brings the same complexity and humor to his visual art pieces. 

"Glabicki is inviting you not to focus on individual equations or images but to contemplate an underlying nature behind these symbols of science. He seems to be validating and rejecting these symbols at the same time. The symbols have worth, in a limited application, but the method is not applicable, say, to introspection or examination of our inner motives, emotions and thought processes. Glabicki’s work, to me, always invited a greater scrutiny of the process of science while also inviting a look at what science might not be capturing but which needs to be experienced and grasped through some deeper process on an individual basis.

The equations, symbols and measurements become, basically, dead but functional statements for the understanding and manipulation of the outer world. They are formulas as much as combinations of Nordic runes were.  Sir James Frazer, after all, pointed out that science was, basically, magical formulae that always ‘worked’ in the world and that magic and science both contained the same basic logical structure.  These attempts to document events in the outer world become insufficient, however, to fully examine the inner world."

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2. CHANG jia at Doosan Gallery New York

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/cruel-and-beautiful-chang-jia-at-doosan.html

CHANG jia is a rising star.  After her NY City show she was chosen as one of 4 Korean artists, by one of South Korea's most prestigious museums, for an ‘artist of the year’ competition. Although she didn’t win, she should have. She brings elements of experimental performance into her visual art and confronts the viewer with real suffering (voluntarily endured by her subjects) to make a statement about the extent to which art can be used to reach and transform others. If a New York City gallery were smart, it would sign this girl up. She deserves to go global. Please read my review, above, for more info about her and what she does.

Unfortunately, she didn't get a lot of press in NY City for her AMAZING show (most of the art rags and 'critics' in NY need to be told, themselves, what amazing art is and have no instincts to trust since they are desiccated buffoons), so I'm proud that I might have been able to promote her a bit. She's doing truly provocative work. She's represented in Chicago by a gutsy gallery - let's hope someone swoops her up here.

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3. Beth Carter at Bertrand Delacroix

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/02/beth-carter-dancing-with-morpheus-at.html

"In 'Wolf with Deer' (2013), we see the wolf is not carrying the deer in a triumphant or exuberant manner.  The posture of the wolf belies the joy of the kill that seems to be reflected on the wolf’s face.  The mood seems mournful and apologetic.  Deep down inside, the wolf rues the loss of the deer and involuntarily expresses grief for the killing.

Furthermore, Carter’s minotaurs are not the bloodthirsty killers from mythology – they are pensive and introspective.   Some of her minotaurs are seated and reading books.  These are minotaurs between meals.  They are using their leisure time to engage in the examined life. They are trying to understand and come to grips with themselves – examining their actions and expressing the dolor of those who cannot change what brings them moral anxiety and pain. In “Sitting Minotaur” (2013) we see such a creature slumped over and dejected."

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4. Kathy Ruttenberg at Stux

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/10/new-work-by-kathy-ruttenberg-at-stux.html

"There’s symbolism in the work of Ruttenberg, but it hearkens back to the type of pre-industrial, pre-urban symbolism often equated to the pagan religions (i.e. the Celts).  Her figures have become re-embedded in a subservient and hapless manner in nature, as nature is seen to be deeply embedded, often literally, in many figures.

Has Ruttenberg gone completely Schopenhauer now that she lives upstate and can commune more easily with all creatures great and small, while watching nature’s cycles more keenly? No, she seems to be saying, however, that our notion of inner or spiritual development is too limited because it is too urban.  Our spiritual narratives often neglect the earth and nature and more meaningfully integrated relations between ourselves and the whole of life. "

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5. Alex Gross at Jonathan LeVine Gallery

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/10/alex-gross-at-jonathan-levine-gallery.html

"In ‘Drones’ we see the sad effects of a culture dedicated to narcissism and hedonism and oblivious of ethical values or the search for meaning.  The smiling broadcasters cheerily report on the latest drone strikes, Obama experiences a type of ecstasy of self-glory, a sheep passively looks on.

In ‘Shopaholics’ the brand buyers are sheep-headed and surrounded by vultures, as if the shoppers have little to offer the world other than flesh to be consumed, someday, by carrion. Or are the shoppers ignoring this vanitas theme – recognize your mortality, repent, do penance, prioritize your values, see and engage the world and strive for meaning."

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6. Boyoung Lee at Hyun Contemporary

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-topsy-turvy-world-of-boyoung-lee-at.html

"The most salient feature of Lee’s buildings would be the windows, through which you see little details denoting middle class, urban, professional life.  Through the windows everything seems perfectly in place and immaculately tidy. The units seem to be empty, the places of solace and comfort we seek to get to after work to get away from each other in order not to go completely nuts.  

The windows become symbolic of our inability to really mesh emotionally with each other – we live separate and secluded, surrounded by the best stuff we can buy, in lieu of feeling a meaningful sense of community.  Nature seems to serve its function in this scheme – in one drawing the roof is overrun by vegetation and the stuff used to enjoy such outcroppings is strewn willy nilly. In another building nature asserts itself by growing wildly from some upper floors. Perhaps biophilia has morphed into some stronger form of dedication to the world we abandoned."

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7. Ian Davis at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/09/rituals-by-ian-davis-at-leslie-tonkonow.html

This didn't hit me at the time, but I think Davis and Neo Rausch are on the same track, but I think Davis is better and more complex.

"In each piece Davis presents groups of men engaged in various types of ritualistic activities, but these don’t seem to be the sorts of activities my dad engaged in at the Loyal Order of the Moose. There are rituals here that are so arcane and perplexing that the participants seem to be engaging in something so higher order as to not be understandable to the uninitiated.  So it’s fun to try to figure out exactly what might be going on in some of these paintings.

In Priests we see many men dressed in white robes who are pouring blood on some type of machinery. It could be some type of nuclear generating machine or it could just be your basic run of the mill factory machine.  Like the real-life activist rituals above, it’s a type of action which just highlights the futility and helplessness of the men to truly change something they feel is wrong.  It’s a meaningful, heartfelt gesture of huge symbolic significance, and no practical change.  

So why do it? Well, it probably has to be done, what else is someone who opposes something that’s wrong supposed to do, sit and do nothing? It also highlights the ‘logic’ of magical rituals that Frazer wrote about in The Golden Bough – the core of any ritual is an approximation of what you want to see happen.  For instance, in some preindustrial societies people would dance and leap high in the air because they believed this would make the crops grow higher. So men in white pouring blood on a machine means, I guess, you want to see this machine bleed and die or become more human or take on more humane qualities (your guess is as good as mine!)."

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8. Mary Henderson at Lyons Wier Gallery

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/03/nothing-fails-like-success-yuppy.html

I have a special place in my heart for Lyons Wier Gallery. Once I placed an ad on craigslist to meet a 'platonic' art gallery partner (yes, I'm still looking) and a very friendly 65 year old retired Jewish lady answered my ad and we went trekking through Chelsea on a Thursday night (no it didn't turn into a Harold/Maude situation - and she hated the atmosphere of the openings since she could see there were a lot of frivolous people getting free drinks).  The owner of Lyons Wier patiently answered all of her questions about art even though he knew she wasn't going to buy anything.  Kudos to that super cool guy.

In any case, please support this gallery - they have nice people there and amazing art.

What I'm really proud of is that I came up with the title "Nothing Fails Like Success" by myself and was later told Arnold Toynbee got there first. Great minds think alike baby.

Henderson paints yuppies.

"First, yuppies seem to represent those folks who were able to pursue their own excellence and success while blithely ignoring the plight of those who were not as privileged. Sure you voted for Obama and do volunteer tutoring at the local Presbyterian church.  But didn’t it bother you just a little bit that your prestigious university was only comprised of 4 % black and Latino students?  When you were studying for your GMAT and/or LSAT, did you ever wonder how the other half lives?  Did you ever really, really, really do pro bono work because you wanted to, or did your firm make you do it?

Secondly, well, here’s a nice quote from the artist Martin Firrell: “No one would wish suffering on themselves but equally a life with nothing remarkable in it would be a kind of bland hell.”  This is the key, I feel, to unlocking the rest of my raw hatred towards these lovable urban creatures."

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9. Rachel Garrard at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/09/rachel-garrard-vessel-at-gasser-and.html

My favorite line from the review: I’m looking at an image of Garrard’s Blue III on the floor in front of me, and it looks like a robot floating in a sensory deprivation tank.

"In Vessel by Rachel Garrard at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert (curated by Mitra Khorasheh), Garrard uses her own bodily proportions to create geometric, cruciform structures often contrasted with gentle and swirling abstract backgrounds.  Did you know that almost every Catholic Church is also ‘cruciform’? Also the cruciform shape is, obviously, an abstract form of the human body.

So when Garrard calls her body ‘a vessel’ I think there are parallels to church architecture. You enter a church and amazing things happen. The body of Christ is (theoretically) present in the Eucharist, a ritual is performed and spiritual union with the Trinity is accomplished. Within this proscribed structure of the human architecture amazing things can also occur. So the body as vessel implies that there is an interface between outer and inner reality – but, I think she is also asking to what extent our inner reality can reorder and perfect itself. Is our inner world just a response to stimulation (as science would have us believe) or is there an inherent factor or capacity within us to determine our own responses to stimuli and to what extent can that capacity be used?"

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10. Kyoshi Nakagami at Galerie Richard

http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2014/01/kyoshi-nakagamis-experiments-with-light.html

"What he does with light, though, goes even beyond the Nihonga tradition.  He shows those qualities and aspects of light, in itself, that allow it to become meaningful to us on a deeper or symbolic level.  He shows us what it is about light that makes light such an important symbol in our religions, mythologies and philosophies.  Basically he seems to be saying “This is the essence of how light is most meaningful to us”  – and he further plays with light and darkness to tweak this “archetypal” relationship and make it more direct and engaging to the viewer."

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